Development Cycle Archive

I hope you keep the hologrind along with the quests as a way to unlock your FSCS, so many people are close to unlocking via holo grinding, it would frustrate me to no end thinking the next profession I unlock after this release could have gotten me my jedi, but all the work was lost.

Also, giving people bonus skills into the new system for how many professions they mastered is brilliant! But I would suggest that the ones that were necessary to unlock your FSCS in the hologrind grant more skills than those that arent.

modify the corvette missions as is, but make it balanced for a single jedi to do them. diff scaled to their skill level.

a rare crystal is found in abandoned ruins on tattooine. the architect who descovered the camber with the crystal has gone missing and you must find him, he is the only one who knows how to unlock the ancient puzzle gaurding this crystal. after many stops you locate him, brake in and find his daughter is also being held and he cannot leave without her, after much heroism and an escape (timed). he unlocks the chamber and you receive the crystal. now do you turn it over to the emporer's advisor(dark side faction), the unground jedi council (light side faction) or keep it for yourself (dark side faction)

add quests that tie into the lore, that makes it possible for the movie characters later:

to make a lightsaber, you then travel to obi-wan's house and leave the how-to book, which luke later finds.

disable the hyperdrive on the Millenium falcon, so han can say its really not his fault.

save a doctor working on a new type of artificial hand, just incase someone gets their cut off.

give reports to the Empire that endor would be ideal to build the second death star ( which reminds me, bringing up the timeline, between episode IV and V we should already be seeing a presense on endor of the empire begining construction of the second death star.

EU characters; karnor jax, kyp durron, vemdaboda,etc...

the trails should all be similar in natural, how the jedi deals with and finishes the trails determins which side he falls to. you need to get a rare part your lightsaber, the person who has it has a sick chlid and needs medcine. (lightside-harder) go running across the galaxies gettingall the components, a chef to make sub parts, and a doctor to make the final step. then bring back for child, then you get the part. (dark side-easy) kill him and take it!

ofcourse you have to have an instance dungeon like the tree cave on dagoba with yoda.

hard question, what skills will you give us be then? i would say all of them.

social quests: get 100 people to hug you or ruffle your hair(what han does to luke)

explorer quest: get clues to go to a personal location somewhere in the galaxy, changes daily.

combat quests: vengence markers(when a person dies, give them an option to place a bounth on the person who killed them and the amount of money they will give ot the BH who does it. along with a small comment. faction points can be also be offered as delegated)

the quests require items to be made to be completed, these items can only be assembled by masters in different fields, doctors, chefs, artisan classes.

however, outside of quests, a jedi should be 100% indenpendant of all classes. they should never have to rely on anyone for anything, this is the jeid way. if they require so much time and effort to acquire, and after that to get a single skill box is 10-1000 times the exp for a normal profession, they shuold be more powerful that any other single (non FS)character in the game.

jedi combat group bonus: when jedi group together they can do amazing things, give large group bonuses to jedi in all jedi groups.

a quest where you needa light and dark side jedi to work together to finish it.

My 2 creds are as follows.

Each of the basic professions has a way of becoming jedi somehow, for instance.

1. Combat: Combat type characters could embark on quests to fight against other jedi as means of tests. I'm thinking these could be more like sparing or training sessions rather than to the death battles. The concept behind them is that the battles would be difficult and scaled to the level of skill that the combatant has achieved. For instance, a novice marksman with starting CDEF pistol could attempt this quest and given something to kill that had maybe 1k HAM, but if a bounty hunter with full buffs, brandy and 80/80% composite did the same quest he'd be given something a bit more scaled to his difficulty, lets say something with like 30k HAM (I honestly have never played a bounty hunter so I don't know how powerful they are, that's just a wild guess on my part). Other options would be defeating enemies of the jedi, training excercises in which people hunted specific creatures, dueling other players successfully, so on and so forth.

2. Crafting: For those who detest combat or simply don't want to give up all of thier nifty crafting skills, you could have a variety of quests center around creating or hunting rare items. Some crafters could gain schematics for parts of lightsabers, jedi robe armorweave segments, jedi training driods, and other jedi related crafting items. Whether or not you let these items be used purely forcompleting the quest or tohave real gameplay use is up to the devs. Other possiblities would be to gather resources of some rare kind that fit a specific description and return them to the quest giver. To prevent buying of resources and the like you could cause a random resource to be generated that the crafter must gather from a planet. The resource could have a different name each time and completely randomized stats and most likely would be unusable for any crafting purposes. For instance, the quest giving jedi might need a rare crystal for his lightsaber or need a specific type of wheat to make a mind enhancing dish and it would be up for the crafter to find it.

3. Entertainer: This one's kind of tough because entertainers don't really have a diversity of skills beyond dancing and playing music. You could have dancers/musicans perform for patrons as per request or something, I honsetly can't think of anything right now.

4. Explorer: Fetch missions mainly, but of a difficult type. You could have a jedi requesting a package be delivered, but to whom he cannot say for risk of that person's identity being compromised. Explorer must then go around and do mini-quests to gather clues, decrypt codes, bribe imperial officers, appeal to jedi sympathetic rebels etc. until they find out who the NPC is. The NPC could be generated upon completion of the quest to prevent people from walking around talking to random NPCs until they find it, or a trigger could be activated on an existing NPC to accept the package. If you really want to get fancy with it, and I recommend that you do, you could start intertwining plot arcs with reoccuring characters that either exist in the Star Wars universe or are made up for the purposes of the game. It would be very refreshing to see a series of connected quests with story lines out side of the theme parks.

Don't think I missed anything, but I do have one last recommendation. I hope beyond all hope that the devs will scale the quests to the skill level of the player rather than making these quests completable only by the most elite. I want the Jedi to be a reward of dedication, not a reward to whomever has the most twinked out gear and has mastered certain skills. What I'm trying to say is that a new character could be made and jump straight into the Jedi quests without having to master several professions. What I wish is that the quests would take roughly the same amount of time regardless of what skill level theplayer's toon is, meaning that a master commando and a novice rifleman would have the same difficulty and effort required on the player's behalf in order to complete the quest. I understand that having mastered more professions will cause the character to progress faster through the quests, and that is completely acceptable to me. But I want to see it possible that a character starting from day one can jump right into the Jedi quests and feisably complete them.

A padawan should have to group with upper jedi to to get higher and higher jedi should have to take a padawan learner to advance in their skills. As it is in the movies. If you dont it should take longer to acheive skill boxes.

On the getting force sensibility i agree with another poster that it should be easy to start but more difficult after that.

Lets face it everyone started playing this game to be jedi. Alot have left the game because of the means of getting it was crazy. Dont make the original toon become FS . There is enough vendors out there empty. No one will grind the crafting professions on a second toonif their toon becomes jedi.

I'll admit I havent read this entire thread (64 pages....) and I know it says "through March" but I see others posting still so I'm just going to toss up my ideas as well. Sorry if some of them were already suggested.

>>Whole Quest ideas

Whole quest right from the start to finish... Player receives a 'vision' of an area. In effect this is merely a small window that pops up with a small image of an environment and then a text description which tells about the vision. From the image the player is able to tell what planet it is and they set off to discover what their vision was about. Player arrives on planet, instead of waypoints they are given a type of "hot or cold" so they have to actively search it out. It can be something as simple as "Your mind tugs you to the east" and changes when the player needs more direction. Player finally reaches the spot that they are supposed to go in.

Ideally this should be a cave or enclosed area that was previously blocked off to all players or invisible but the player can see it open... like the red-wall for vehicles on most buildings except made to look like the terrain in that area. When the player enters the area and goes inside they could find either a holocron with instructions or a message on it, a jedi spirit, a holo-recording, etc. A few different ways to learn the information but it boils down to the player receives instructions on what they are to do next. As they continue through the quests (all with no waypoints... that defeats the journey) they have missions to retrieve information which they can read to learn about the history of jedi, they'll be given tasks to solve problems which can be done through negotiation (and additional quests to help the negotiations along) or by brute force killing everything. They'll also receive puzzle quests which require them to solve riddles of sort in order to achieve goals. Talking to specific people or collecting items from people/creatures to be used for example. The puzzles shouldnt be overly difficult but should require some thinking and there should be multiple puzzles so that you dont get strategy guides popping up.

As the player continues along their journey the quests start to become more obvious in the path they are taking. If they choose to negotiate and find peaceful solutions they'll lean more to the light side. If they go in and kill everyone without a word spoken they'll lean more along the dark side. Eventually the quests stop giving you such an obvious choice and you are set on your path (although you should be able to change that path but it would require you to stop acting like the aligned path you're going down). More missions, more history and more puzzles later you're finally ready to become a jedi. By now you would have some lightsaber skills and basic powers as well as some of your paths powers, so you're ready for the last test. You're sent to defeat a jedi of the opposing jedi path, upon which you're given the final multi-choice quest. By that I mean if you're light and they send you to deal with a dark jedi you could turn them back to the lightside or fight them. Turning them would make you more along the light path, killing them would drop your light alignment. Same with dark jedi, if they kill the light jedi they will become more in tune with the darkside, or by sparing them and not killing them they'll gain more light side. It would help top off that press to change your alignment if you arent liking your path.

>>NPC’s players might interact with throughout the quest

Dont bring the big names in like yoda or exar kun... thats done too often. Bring new jedi in that we hadnt heard of before. Someone who fought against exar kun, a past student of yoda, the force sensitive offspring of an unknown jedi etc. Make new faces that we can learn about... the old names have been used to death.

>>Quests for different profession types, for instance, social quests, explorer quests, combat quests, etc.

The different professions shouldnt get different quests. Entertainers can become a jedi, but they're going to have to learn to fight. At the same time, combat players can become jedi but they're going to have to learn how to be peaceful at times and solve puzzles, not just kill. The journey should include a large enough variety in their goals that any profession can feel at home sometimes, and at other times adapt to something they arent used to. Thats what will make it worthwhile and enjoyable.

>>Player interdependencies and cooperation’s

I want to say that players should have to solo the journey, but I doubt thats going to happen. Cooperation... players can help eachother with puzzles by suggesting solutions and talking to players who have completed other puzzles for ideas. Interdependencies... none during the journey. Players should not have to rely on another player to progress this profession. In the books/movies they had the student/master situation so at the very most I'd say allow players to do the master/student format but only when a player has higher skill in a specific jedi tree then the other. When grouped they should be able to get special missions meant for student/master and the student also gains more xp in the specific trees that the master is higher in while grouped.